How can this disastrous situation be avoided? Not by an appeal to morality or justice; in the state of nature these ideas have no meaning. Yet, everyone wishes to survive, and everyone can reason. Reason leads people to seek peace if it is attainable but to continue to use all the means of war if it is not. How is peace to be obtained? Only by a means of a social contract, in which each person agrees to give up his right to attack others in return for the same concession from everyone else.
But how is the social contract to come about? Hobbes is not under the illusion that the mere making of a promise in a contract will carry any weight. Because everyone is rational and self-interested, no one will keep his promise unless it is in his interest to do so. Therefore, in order for the contract to work, there must be some means of enforcing it. To do this, everyone must hand over his powers to some other person or group of persons who will punish anyone who breaches the contract. This person or group of persons Hobbes calls the “sovereign.” The sovereign may be a monarch, an elected legislature, or almost any other form of political authority; the essence of sovereignty is only the possession of sufficient power to keep the peace by punishing those who would break it. When such a sovereign—the Leviathan—exists, justice becomes possible because agreements and promises are necessarily kept. At the same time, each person has adequate reason to behave justly, for the sovereign will ensure that those who do not keep their agreements are suitably punished.
Hobbes witnessed the turbulence and near anarchy of the English Civil Wars (1642–51) and was keenly aware of the dangers caused by disputed sovereignty. His solution was to insist that sovereignty must not be divided. Because the sovereign is appointed to enforce the social contract that is fundamental to peace, it is rational to resist the sovereign only if it directly threatens one’s life. Hobbes was, in effect, a supporter of absolute sovereignty, and this has been the focus of much political discussion of his ideas. His significance for ethics, however, lies rather in his success in dealing with the subject independently of theology and of quasi-Aristotelian doctrines, such as the view that the world is designed for the benefit of human beings. With this achievement, Hobbes brought ethics into the modern era. Early intuitionists: Cudworth, More, and Clarke
There was, of course, immediate opposition to Hobbes’s views. Ralph Cudworth (1617–88), one of a group of philosophers and theologians known as the Cambridge Platonists, defended a position in some respects similar to that of Plato. That is to say, Cudworth believed that the distinction between good and evil does not lie in human desires but is something objective that can be known by reason, just as the truths of mathematics can be known by reason. Cudworth was thus a forerunner of what has since come to be called ethical intuitionism, the view that there are objective moral truths that can be known by a kind of rational intuition. This view was to attract the support of a series of distinguished thinkers through the early 20th century, when it became for a time the dominant view in British academic philosophy.
Henry More (1614–87), another leading member of the Cambridge Platonists, attempted to give effect to the comparison between mathematics and morality by formulating moral axioms that could be recognized as self-evidently true. In marked contrast to Hobbes, More included an “axiom of benevolence”: “If it be good that one man should be supplied with the means of living well and happily, it is mathematically certain that it is doubly good that two should be so supplied, and so on.” Here, More was attempting to build on something that Hobbes himself accepted—namely, the desire of each individual to be supplied with the means of living well. More, however, wanted to enlist reason to show how one could move beyond this narrow egoism to a universal benevolence. There are traces of this line of thought in the Stoics, but it was More who introduced it into British ethical thinking, wherein it is still very much alive.
Samuel Clarke (1675–1729), the next major intuitionist, accepted More’s axiom of benevolence in slightly different words. He was also responsible for a “principle of equity,” which, though derived from the Golden Rule so widespread in ancient ethics, was formulated with a new precision: “Whatever I judge reasonable or unreasonable for another to do for me, that by the same judgment I declare reasonable or unreasonable that I in the like case should do for him.” As for the means by which these moral truths are known, Clarke accepted Cudworth’s and More’s analogy with truths of mathematics and added the idea that what human reason discerns is a certain “fitness or unfitness” about the relationship between circumstances and actions. The right action in a given set of circumstances is the fitting one; the wrong action is unfitting. This is something known intuitively and is self-evident.
Clarke’s notion of fitness is obscure, but intuitionism faces a still more serious problem that has always been a barrier to its acceptance. Suppose that it is possible to discern through reason that it would be wrong to deceive a person for profit. How does the discerning of this moral truth provide one with a motive sufficient to override the desire for profit? The position of the intuitionist divorces one’s moral knowledge from the psychological forces that motivate human action.
The punitive power of Hobbes’s sovereign is, of course, one way to provide sufficient motivation for obedience to the social contract and to the laws decreed by the sovereign as necessary for the peaceful functioning of society. The intuitionists, however, wanted to show that morality is objective and holds in all circumstances, whether there is a sovereign or not. Reward and punishment in the afterlife, administered by an all-powerful God, would provide a more universal motive; and some intuitionists, such as Clarke, did make use of this divine sanction. Other thinkers, however, wanted to show that it is reasonable to do what is good independently of the threats of any external power, human or divine. This desire lay behind the development of the major alternative to intuitionism in 17th- and 18th-century British moral philosophy: moral sense theory. The debate between the intuitionists and the moral sense theorists aired for the first time the major issue in what is still the central debate in moral philosophy: Is morality based on reason or on feelings? Shaftesbury and the moral sense school
The term moral sense was first used by the 3rd earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), whose writings reflect the optimistic tone both of the school of thought he founded and of so much of the philosophy of the 18th-century Enlightenment. Shaftesbury believed that Hobbes had erred by presenting a one-sided picture of human nature. Selfishness is not the only natural passion. There are also natural feelings such as benevolence, generosity, sympathy, gratitude, and so on. These feelings give one an “affection for virtue”—what Shaftesbury called a moral sense—which creates a natural harmony between virtue and self-interest. Shaftesbury was, of course, realistic enough to acknowledge that there are also contrary desires and that not all people are virtuous all of the time. Virtue could, however, be recommended because—and here Shaftesbury drew upon a theme of Greek ethics—the pleasures of virtue are superior to the pleasures of vice. Butler on self-interest and conscience